Bubble Or Not, Facebook Staff Cashes Out

Paying for the mistakes of its Web 1.0 forefathers, Facebook is losing talented employees over fears of another tech bubble. "While Silicon Valley and Wall Street debate whether a new technology bubble is in the making, some early Facebook employees are not taking any chances," The New York Times reports. "They're leaving the company to cash out on millions of dollars in stock options while Facebook's valuation continues to soar."

Says one former Facebook employee in reference to the first dot-com crash: "If you've seen the world blow up once, you just don't know what's going to happen a year from now." According to company policy, current Facebook employees can't sell stock. "It seemed very risky to stay in a situation where all of your liquidity was tied up in what I consider a high-risk company," the unnamed employee told The Times.

More broadly, employees and investors at dozens of start-ups have sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of shares, according to The Times, which, in turn, is fueling what it call a "booming market in private transactions."